At this point in my life, a solid 70% of everything I've ever said resides on Google's servers somewhere. If the company were to ever close its doors, those words would be lost to history. But that's about to change. Google's rolling out the ability to easily download a copy of your Gmail and Calendar data, so you can migrate it to another service when the unthinkable - or the inevitable - happens.

Gmail data will be provided in the MBOX format, while Calendar will shoot out your schedule as an iCalendar file. You can start exporting right away, but for the time being, most people will only have the option to export their calendars. Google will roll out the ability to download Gmail messages over the coming month.

Comments

Mkvarner

That took them a long time!

pfmiller

This has been possible for years. You've pretty much always been able to download your Gmail through the POP3 or IMAP interfaces and iCal links to your calendar have also been available from the beginning. I have an iCal archive of my Google calendar on my backup disk from 2008.

Matthew Fry

This is good motivation to clean the useless crap out of my email.

Mark

Now, will we be able to import that data into another Google account? Would make switching between Google accounts much easier.

Cherokee4life

Hopefully they will let me switch all my paid apps and such to another Google Account then I would be even happier!

yodatom10

100 percent of what i own (digitally) resides within google somewhere. so new features like this are always welcome

ssj4Gogeta

Google already have a set of tools for getting data out of their products in a portable format: http://www.dataliberation.org/
Not a lot of companies would do that.

rasty++

I can re-import them after?

yodatom10

I would imagine so(just like contacts) but i'm not positive

pfmiller

Yes, you can. Years ago I created a second gmail account and transferred a folder to the new account through the POP interface. This is nothing new.

Rami

WOW... THANKS GOOGLE.

But as noted, I still don't have the option to export Gmail, only calendar, so to remember I will add a calendar event in 10 days to check again for gmail export, and then export the calendar :)

Well, export via the liberation front pages. One can also export everything via IMAP and CalDAV.

Daldain

For GMail, pretty sure POP and IMAP was an option for copying contents out?

natabbotts

Usable but slow, and difficult to import into a different webmail system. This is better I think (:

woj_tek

how come? I have cronjob grabbing all e-mail via IMAP - works like a charm :) also - in thunderbird you could simply move all e-mails from one account to another - given that it has IMAP support... viva open standards, that google seems to despise recently ;)